April 29, 2016

The Ghost Town

aacalifornia-paradise-b.jpg

I drive the Skyway to the town named Paradise,
park his car at the canyon's rim, and sit awhile
in the hot silence of the afternoon looking out
at the Sierra mountains where, in June, the winter lingers.
On the seat beside me a well-taped cardboard cube
contains what remains of my father. I climb out
and, taking the cube under my arm, begin to climb
down the canyon's lava wall to the stream below.
The going is slow, but we get to the bottom by and by
and sitting on some moss, we rest awhile, the cube and I,
beside the snow-chilled stream.
- - My Father

There are two ways into Paradise, the back way and the Skyway. When you can you take the Skyway but the back way will get you there just the same. When I moved back to Paradise after being gone for more than 60 years everything had changed but nothing had changed. Superimposed over Paradise as it is was Paradise as it was. Not everywhere but in the rise and roll of the land and roads; in the place names and the clearings. It was there in the overlay, in that "certain slant of light" where you see what is not there layered over what is. Because it what was is still there; in moments that appear unbidden and "fade upon the blowing of the horn."

And in those translucent moments I often see all Paradise as ghostly, drifting like a soft wall of mist across the scrim screen of the present. I can always hold this at bay, filter it out to get the errands of the day done. And then in an unguarded moment, it returns.

One afternoon soon after I arrived in Paradise I saw my father standing next to the Skyway. I saw my father, alive as you or me, and dead these forty years.

By the time I saw him it didn't really shock me. I'd lived in Paradise for over a month and I knew these things could happen here. Paradise was not just Paradise. It was a ghost town. And it was filled with my ghosts.

I first saw my father in the middle of the day next to Big O Tires on the Skyway. I'd gone there to have some minor repair done to my car and, while they took the car into the bay behind me, I wandered into the empty front showroom and gazed through the Big O display windows looking out over the Skyway and down the steep decline and quick rise of Pearson Road. Then I glanced down to the left of the showroom at a small vacant building next door. It was caked with many years of paint. The latest coats were pale gray with a light blue trim. The windows were sheets of painted plywood nailed tight to the frames and the door was solid with a padlock. It was shut tight and, like many buildings on the Skyway in Paradise and beyond, had a large red and white "For Lease" sign attached to the front.

As I looked at it my father walked through the closed and padlocked door and, like me, stood looking down hill as the traffic paused at the light and then turned left or right at the T-junction.

It was December for me, but it must have been summer for him because he stood there in his starched, short-sleeved, crisp and immaculate white shirt with a stainless steel Parker ballpoint pen in his pocket, a sharp crease in his slacks, his perfectly shined shoes, and a ruler-level flat-top -- his choice of a "sharp" haircut for men and boys. He stood there for about a minute as I watched him without moving, the smell of new tires in my nostrils. Then he turned and walked back through the walls of his office.

Behind me a burst of compressed air from a lug wrench brought me out of my brown study and I was looking again at a gray and blue building with a small courtyard that was now "For Lease." It was then I recognized the old building as the place where my father had had his car dealership when we all lived in Paradise in the mid-1950s. I told myself that what I had just experienced was some sort of vivid memory from my childhood as a kind of faint film from my mind projected onto the mundane present. Yes, that was all it was. I'm sure of that. I'm an educated man of no little experience in the real, wide world of now. It only felt like seeing a ghost. In broad daylight in deep December, dressed for summer.

The last time I'd seen my father was in a dream decades after he died on the operating table. He came to me out of the streets in the Red City that persists off and on over the years in my dreams. He was wearing a hospital smock stained with large patches of his blood. He said to me, "I don't belong with the dead," and then he faded. I hadn't seen him since.

This time, on the Skyway of Paradise, he was looking much better; looking at home with the dead. This time he didn't even seem dead, only translucent. I had a brief moment of disappointment that he was gone before we could continue the conversation from where he left off in my dream, but having been briefly dead I knew that the dead have little to say to the living. In any case, it was my father and I was, this time, glad to see him.

The poet says "Old men should be explorers." When I was younger I admired that sentiment but now, as the hand of age closes around me, I find I don't wish to explore new lands, but to explore again those I have already passed through trying to see what I missed in the first hectic rush towards my "goals."

These days I pass my father's place on the Skyway several times a week while turning onto the Skyway on an errand in Paradise or down from the ridge and into the valley to see my mother or to get the kind of meal unavailable in Paradise. My father's vacant office is right at the turn and, because of that (or so I tell myself), I don't stop. Someday I might pull over down the road a bit and walk back to his office hoping to see him again. But I don't think he'll oblige if I do. He doesn't have to. He's not inside our time now. He's just one of many ghosts that I've seen of late, up here on the ridge, up here in Paradise.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at April 29, 2016 1:12 AM
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Next time you're over that way stop at the Cozy Diner a couple blocks north of your fathers place, on the Skyway and check out their Paul Bunyan burger for $10.29. (2) 1/3lb patties and all the works. yowza

BTW, it's Pearson Rd not Penze Rd.

Oh yeah, get a side of their cole slaw, you'll like it, it's that creamy kind like the Colonel used to make before they went to the musty style. It sorta cleanses the pallet if you know what I mean. You can thank me later.


[Ed: Pearson, yes. Thanks. I was thinking Pentz, the road where Pearson it comes to an end.]

Posted by: ghostsniper at April 25, 2016 12:58 PM

My grand dad retired to Paradise about 1970, my mom retired there about 1993 to care for her step mom. I lived there from '97 to '05 until retiring from USAF, last assignment Beale AFB. Pentz Rd was the route down towards Hwy 70 and Oroville. I heard lake Oroville is full again. Not sure I ever saw it all the way full in years I lived there. My mom followed me back to socal to be close to me and my family, so other than you, I don't have any connections left, although my mom has a few, and fewer every year. At one point I had all three kids in Paradise high school and they still have friends from those days. The folks who run Radio Paradise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Paradise) bought our house from us when we left.

Posted by: stephen at April 25, 2016 1:37 PM

Another classic.

I go back to my boyhood village, Estes Park, Co. nearly every year. Very much changed, and not necessarily for the better, in the last 66 years. The sweep of the mountains, the familiar stretch of the Front Range from Longs Peak in the south all the way to Mummy Mountain on the north, has not changed. They are just as they always were and will be.

I hike up to the Fountain at the base of Lumpy Ridge. The fountain is a memorial to our son, who left us behind 37 years ago now - he died in a climbing accident. I sit by the fountain and gaze long at the peaks. Such a magnificent view! And I remember climbing with him. Up the East Face of Longs, struggling up the South Face of Zowie Pinnacle, bivouacking by an icy brook high above timberline, and much more. And it's all good. We miss him still, but the memories of him are sweet.

Posted by: Jimmy J. at April 25, 2016 4:35 PM

Thank you for this. The older you get, the more you can taste the past.

Different state, same name - this played in my head as I read your narrative.

It seems to fit. (yes, it's exactly what you think it will be...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEy6EuZp9IY

Posted by: mezzrow at April 25, 2016 6:07 PM

I go back to my three boyhood digs ('30s-'40s) via Google Earth. Two look much the same. One had a change in ethnicity and looks it.

Posted by: BillH at April 26, 2016 6:39 AM

Just returned from visiting relatives in my later-boyhood digs in Michigan. Didn't go to my old neighborhood in Detroit where I have my first memories. Google Earth tells me the old postwar house is still standing, but the neighborhood has become much too dangerous these days and there's nobody left from my family in that part of town anyhow. But the area northwest of the city where we ended up is much safer and still has plenty of family members remaining. As others have noticed with their old places, nothing really stays the same. No family ghosts, though. I was happy to visit, but happier still to return to Florida.

Posted by: waltj at April 26, 2016 9:17 AM

Your writing makes my heart leak sometimes. Like this time.

Posted by: DeAnn at April 26, 2016 3:45 PM